Our students are mostly digital learners. We, as teachers, are not. How do we best bridge this divide and bring education into the digital learning space where students reside? How do we take what we as teachers know in one literacy and allow students to demonstrate mastery in another, without losing control of the classroom? One answer: digital storytelling around curricular content.
Related content: 5 ways we’ve integrated STEAM into storytelling
From the creation of a new dystopia to an investigative report about water corruption; from a rap about immigration to a police drama that is resolved through trigonometry; digital storytelling is the process of addressing curricular content through short video and audio narratives that can be in the form of a straight documentary, a news report, a game show or a comic parody. The formats are, in fact, endless.
But the bottom line is that digital storytelling is a critical bridge from an educators’ curricular knowledge-base to the digital learning sphere of the students.
About the Author:
Heather Sinclair has been teaching all the sciences across 7th through 12th grade for more than a decade, and has settled in middle school in Maine. She values authentic learning, student connection and self-expression.
Matt Loera teaches economics and civics at New Valley High School in Santa Clara, CA. Before starting his teaching career Matt owned a professional services firm in Silicon Valley for 15 years, and prior to that worked for Allstate Insurance in corporate finance.
